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COUNTY COMMENT %u2022 March 2025 13the role of having to explain a tragedy to a fellow employee%u2019s family. They were challenged to ask themselves if they did everything possible to prevent a tragedy, to consider the natural consequences of silence or inaction, and if they could live with that decision. Employees, co-workers, crew leaders and supervisors had equal accountability. There would be consequences for actions and inaction.Building an effective safety program had its challenges. If this program was going to be successful, we had to be open-minded and be able to accept critical perspective. We had to park the CYA attitude at the door. We had to look at all accidents as if they were preventable and we had to break away from defensive posturing. Most importantly, we had to treat every incident as an opportunity to learn if we wanted to break the cycle of repeating the same incidents. We had to not settle for initial conclusions. We had to follow up, investigate and ask questions. And we needed to keep asking questions until a true root cause was revealed for each incident. We learned that it takes asking the %u201cwhy%u201d question at least five times to get to the true root cause. I experienced this firsthand as we started taking a more in-depth approach to investigating serious incidents. And, what we found most of the time is that by the time we got to the fifth %u201cwhy?%u201d we learned that we were not doing a good enough job training employees on some of the tasks they were being assigned.The result of the efforts of my former county to build a %u201cculture of safety%u201d was a marked success. The county began to see an immediate decrease in the number of monthly claims with many months not having any claims. That meant that we were doing a good job of keeping our employees safe. From a budgetary perspective, the county saw its experience modification factor for workers%u2019 compensation insurance go from 1.10 to 0.70 over 3 years. For a county with over 380 employees, that meant savings of over $100,000 per year.I know that many counties are doing it right and have been doing it right for a long time when it comes to safety. Going through the process that my former county went through may not be the right process for all. But we can all help improve safety for ourselves and our employees by developing an active mindset of %u201cSafety First%u201d in everything we do. We can do this by planning and discussing each day%u2019s work activities before we head out the gate, making sure the employees have the right tools and training for the task and making sure you learn and share what you learn from every experience.As your KAC Local Road Engineer, I will be sharing an article with you each month. Some articles will be sharing information on relevant topics based on best practices or subject matter information obtained from other sources, and from time-to-time will be information based upon my own experiences. If you have an interest in a particular topic, feel free to let me know. If it is a relevant topic with broad interest, I would be open to doing research and writing an article. You can reach me by email at lutz@kansascounties.org or phone at 316-322-5165. n